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This guide shows how you can install and use incron on a Debian Etch system. Incron is similar to cron, but instead of running commands based on time, it can trigger commands when file or directory events occur (e.g. a file modification, changes of permissions, etc.).

Linux-Magazine author Dmitri Popov is starting a brand new blog titled "Cooking the Productivity Sauce", offering tips for the productive use of open source applications. As a start he introduces the OutWit extension for web scrapping. But even better yet, OutWit allows you to save and export the scrapped data, which makes it a great research tool. The extension has the potential to turn your favorite browser into a powerful tool for extracting and organizing data, so he says.

Well Labor Day is here and gone again, and the footloose, fancy-free days of summer are over for another year. It may warrant the shedding of a small tear or two, but we here in the Linux community are fortunate to have so much uplifting and entertaining news these days to keep our spirits up.

So Psystar has denied Apple's allegations of copyright and other infringements associated with the sale of its Open Computer. Psystar's Open Computer is assembled from generic parts, and offered for sale with Mac OS X preinstalled as one of the operating system options. Is Psystar putting up fallacious arguments in its defence and counterattack or are its arguments justified?

The PSMon utility lets you specify which processes should be running, how much of resources such as CPU or RAM each is allowed to use when it runs, and how many instances are able to be run. PSMon will then ensure that these processes are running and kill off a process if it starts to use too many resources, and possibly restart a process if it has crashed.

With the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and IDG's LinuxWorld show in the rearview mirror of 2008, it is clear that open source is no longer just a trendy conversation. What has happened is a clear evolution of a community that has grown up and produced intelligent, cutting-edge technologies with an eye on making computing faster, smarter and cheaper for corporate users. Companies like Openmoko are challenging the mobile device market with its notion that users should control what applications are installed. Others like XAware and SnapLogic are opening up data integration possibilities, and still more are tangling with virtualization, databases, and trading systems. Along with a company accurately called Untangle, the companies' point is to make computing less complex. The decision is no longer a question of open source, but about what product is best at solving computing problems regardless of how it was built.

State IT organisation representatives from Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay have signed a declaration expressing their dissatisfaction with the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The countries signed the declaration at the CONSEGI conference in Brazil over the weekend in response to news that the ISO/IEC had rejected the appeals from South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela and India to the ISO process to adopt Microsoft’s OOXML format as an international standard.

Last week I wrote an article for O'Reilly News documenting alleged anti-Israel political bias and the posting of false information at Google Earth. Similar charges had been previously made about Google News. The main point of the article was to question the integrity of the data provided by Google and questioning if, in effect, Google was losing the trust of its wider user community by making decisions which suited a specific political agenda. [...] It appears that Google has made changes which do address the concerns of the company's critics on this issue.

In one of the less likely combinations of talent, Stephen Fry has been called in to be part of the 25th anniversary of the GNU operating system. Fry, a popular humorist, actor and novelist features in a five-minute long film in which he explains the history of free software and its importance in the world. In true style Fry is entertaining and offers one of the best - and most understandable - explanations of free software and the the GNU is not Unix philosophy.

Despite their critics, analysts at their best can bridge a significant gap between vendors and software users. Vendor marketers who create information for prospective customers are understandably sales-driven and rarely grasp how their products are deployed. The result tends to be material strong on superlatives and weak on substance. Certain features are emphasized while the processes involved in implementation are largely ignored, even though these may be more significant and costly than the software itself.

Criticisms of the Ubuntu distribution and Canonical, its corporate sponsor, are not hard to come by. Depending on who is speaking, Ubuntu and Canonical are guilty of profiting from the free software community without giving back to it, forking important projects or distributions, legitimizing the use of binary-only system components, and more. Of all of these gripes, it is the "contributing to the community" complaint which is heard most. If one believes these complaints, Ubuntu is a parasitic operation which does not understand how the community works and which is harmful to the community as a whole.

The creation of an automated article listing on the central column of the OpenSourceToday's home page would have begun by running the called php source specified in the action attribute of the input form. The php scripts would have begun by creating the text of the article summary that contained the publication date, the linked title, the author's name and the capsule summary. The entire string described would be enclosed within a div tag pair when written into a new text file. The next task would have been creating a backup copy of the original listing, then appending its content into the new file that contained only the newest article summary. Finally this completed new listing would be copied over the original. That is the process I describe here, in detail.

Search giant Google has confirmed it will shortly unveil a new Web browser dubbed 'Chrome' and based on code from the Webkit project. After rumors broke out all over the Web about the new software, Google confirmed the plans this morning in a blog post here. Word first surfaced of the plans in a Web comic book introducing Google Chrome, the search giant's long-rumored open source browser project. While the illustrations, created by cartoonist Scott McCloud, were not announced by Google, they do contain the quotes and likenesses of 19 Google developers.

Several weeks ago, I was flying west past Chicago, watching the ground slide by below, when I spotted the signature figure eight of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, better known as Fermilab. I shot some pictures, which I put up at the Linux Journal Flickr pool (Flickr also uses Linux). I figured Fermilab naturally would use Linux, and found that Fermilab has its own distro: Fermi Linux. Its public site provides a nice window into a highly professional and focused usage of Linux. Within Fermi Linux, specific generations are known as Scientific Linux Fermi, each with version numbers and the code names Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom, Up, Feynmann, Wilson and Lederman.

It's been a while since we've taken any time to look at any formal systems or number systems (all the way back to The M I U Puzzle, so today we're going to kick off a quick beginner post that is, somewhat Linux and Unix independent(although we'll be scripting and using Linux/Unix tools to do this work for us in future posts). It's going to segue into something more complicated in a future post, but, for today, we're just going to lay the groundwork. In fact, the beginnings of this process will seem almost brain-dead simple. Which is okay, because they pretty much are ;)

In the first part of the libpcap series a rudimentry packet reader (or sniffer) was built which could read and print tcp/ip traffic on a particular interface. In the second text a look at some simple checks of the data itself, adding options like interface selection, libpcap filter options and verbosity levels. Some of the checks included are:

• IP Packet Truncation
• IP Header Length
• Ethernet Header Length

The filter options are eventually passed exactly like tcpdump using the tcpdump argv vector copy.

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Before the big launch, the Jesus Phone accounted for just 0.16 percent of the operating system market as measured by web browsing usage. After the iPhone 3G hit the streets that global share shot up to 0.3 percent. Linux, meanwhile, currently has a 0.93 percent share...

In the latest twist in the OOXML - ODF document format story, ISO and IEC, two of the most venerable standards organizations In the world, have been dealt a slap by government IT agencies in six countries.

One of the essential ingredients to running a successful business is maintaining an advantage over your competition. Many different types of computer software can significantly enhance performance at the workplace, or in the home. A polished office suite, a reliable backup system, an intuitive desktop environment, even a welcome break from reality with an immersive game all have their part to play in helping users achieve their maximum potential. However, this article focuses predominately on software that helps individuals organise their day, capture and retrieve information, assist them fulfilling their various roles in life (whether as a parent, employer, employee, good neighbour etc), as well as streamlining the desktop.

Deluge is a full-featured free opensource BitTorrent client for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It uses libtorrent in it’s backend and PyGTK for it’s user interface. Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive. Deluge features a rich plugin collection; in fact, most of Deluge’s functionality is available in the form of plugins. Deluge is not designed for any one specific desktop environment and will work just fine in GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others.